The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is comprised of an expansive network of interconnected computers upon which businesses, governments, groups, and individuals throughout the world maintain inter-linked computer files known as web pages. Shoppers navigate these pages by means of computer software programs commonly known as Internet browsers. Due to the vast number of WWW sites, many web pages have a redundancy of information or share a strong likeness in either function or title. The vastness of the unstructured WWW causes shoppers to rely primarily on Internet search engines to retrieve information or to locate businesses. These search engines use various means to determine the relevance of a shopper-defined search to the information retrieved.
The authors of web pages provide information known as metadata within the body of the hypertext markup language (HTML) document that defines the web pages. A computer software product known as a web crawler systematically accesses web pages by sequentially following hypertext links from page to page. The crawler indexes the pages for use by the search engines from information about a web page as provided by its address or Universal Resource Locator (URL), metadata, and other criteria found within the page. The crawler is run periodically to update previously stored data and to append information about newly created web pages. The information compiled by the crawler is stored in a metadata repository or database. The search engines search this repository to identify matches for the shopper-defined search rather than attempt to find matches in real time.
A typical search engine has an interface with a search window where the shopper enters an alphanumeric search expression or keywords. The search engine sifts through available web sites for the shopper's search terms, and returns the results of the search in the form of HTML pages. Each search result includes a list of individual entries that have been identified by the search engine as satisfying the shopper's search expression. Each entry or “hit” may include a hyperlink that points to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) location or web page.
Electronic shopping (or e-shopping) has been gaining popularity on the WWW. An outgrowth of the popularity of Internet or on-line shopping is the advent of on-line comparison shopping engines. Price comparison tools, often promoted by Web portals such as Yahoo!®, AltaVista®, Shopping.com®, or shopping services such as Bluefly® or MySimon.com®, are essentially web search engines that allow a user to search a population of web merchants for the lowest price for a desired item.
These search engines allow a shopper to enter a key word that is usually a description of the desired item. In response to the shopper's query, the search engines return a set of corresponding Web-based matches listing the merchants or merchant's Web sites that offer the desired item.
Typically, the user must undertake these searches on an item-by-item basis. The search is performed against a set of retailers determined by the search engine owner. The population of merchants searched may be open-ended as in the case of search engines that use agents or “bots” to scan the Web for such items or closed as in search engines that search only across a group of subscribed merchants.
To create a database of items and their prices, the price crawlers typically go to each merchant's web site, extract the price information from that web site, and create a database of items, prices, and other supporting information. However, it is difficult to acquire the price data from the merchant's web site. Technologies exist that prevent a price crawler or other such other service from extracting any information from a Web site.
Price information obtained over the Web can be incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date. In addition, the centralized approach for price comparison used by current price comparison web sites could be unduly manipulated by merchants. In addition, current comparison shopping solutions rely on price crawlers capturing information from the merchant. There is currently no mechanism for allowing merchants and customers to interact in a marketplace format, in that the current comparison shopping solutions available to the customers are limited.
What is therefore needed is a system and associated method for direct communication between buyer and sellers, allowing a free marketplace interaction. The need for such a system and method has heretofore remained unsatisfied.